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Jenkins is a Continuous Integration, Continous Deployment (CI/CD)tool. Jenkins is written in Java and released as open source product. It’s used heavily in Continuous Integration as it allows code to be build deployed and tested automatically. For software development, you can hook it up with most code repo’s and there are loads of plugins that you can integrate with various software tools for better technical governance. Think it as a very advanced task scheduler which can do workflow or as a middle man between your code repo and your build server which triggers a build for every change made in the source code repository.

Jenkins offers the following major features out of the box, and much more can be added through plugins:

Easy installation: Just run java -jar jenkins.war, deploy it in a servlet container or install with any native package manager. No additional install, no database.

Easy configuration: Jenkins can be configured entirely from its user-friendly web GUI.

Jenkins is pretty much understood after you’ll understand the terms Continous Integration and Continous Deployment (Delivery).

The relevant terms here are “Continuous Integration” and “Continuous Deployment”, often used together and abbreviated as CI/CD. Originally Continuous Integration means that you run your “integration tests” at every code change while Continuous Delivery means that you automatically deploy every change that passes your tests. However recently the term CI/CD is being used in a more general way to represent everything related to automation of the pipeline from where a developer adds his change to a central repository until that code ends up in production. This post is based on the latter meaning of the terms CI/CD.

CI system gathers all your code from different developers and makes sure it compiles and build fine. Once the code is built it deploys it on the test server for testing. Once you’re made sure the build compiles fine then, Jenkins can be tuned to deploy the application on the production server satisfying the goal of CD. There are many different ways in which Jenkins can be set up to drive a CI/CD pipeline. This details provided below describes a simple yet powerful configuration:

Each step is implemented as a Jenkins job of type “free-style software project”.

The first step (“Build”) is connected to a version control system. This step can either poll the repository, get notified via a webhook, or run on a schedule or on demand. Subsequent steps have a build trigger that starts the job when the previous step finished.
Artifacts are copied between the different jobs via the “Copy Artifact” plugin. This requires the “Archive Artifacts” setting to be enabled. Deploy triggers from “Copy Artifact” to a Configuration Manager which will trigger a Container service to deploy the new application.

As told earlier in this post we can install Jenkins using the native package available for the respective Operating System. This is detailed in another post which you can read here. There is another way of installing the Jenkins which we’ll be discussing here and consist of 2 steps,

Install the latest version of Apache tomcat

Download and Deploy Jenkins war file

As a prerequisite, we will be installing Java which can be installed with yum command.